


Wolves At The Door

by Nevanna



Category: Jekyll (TV), The Middleman (TV)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-27
Updated: 2014-02-27
Packaged: 2018-01-13 22:40:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,472
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1243180
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nevanna/pseuds/Nevanna
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When a familiar display of superhuman abilities catches Miranda's eye, she must decide whether to leave retirement.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wolves At The Door

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for Showvillain, and originally posted on 6/5/11. It's set after the main action of _Jekyll_ but before the coda, and contains vague spoilers.

Miranda finds the article tucked away in the gossip pages of the _Times_ , on a drizzly Sunday morning. MANIAC MODEL, the headline reads, above a blurred photograph of a girl with long hair, a painted-on dress, flailing arms, and a snarling mouth full of inhumanly sharp teeth. She’d had an altercation with a photographer at a fashion show on the Continent, and lost her temper spectacularly. The man was twice her size and still recovering in hospital. 

“…do you think of ‘Victor’?” Min is asking.

“Hmm?” Miranda glances up. “Lovely chap.”

Min glowers. “For the baby. We’ve still not decided what to call him, remember?” 

“Last week you were all over ‘Demian’.”

“’Victor’ sounds a bit less… well, sinister, don’t you think?” She leans across the table. “You’re following the fashion news now, are you? I suppose everyone needs a hobby.”

Miranda points to the article. Her wife reads it through, murmuring the occasional phrase aloud. “Paris… unveiling of the Famouse fall line… unexpected burst of … oh.” Her eyes widen.

“It might not be what we think.”

“But you reckon it might be,” Min states. “Are you going to tell…?”

Miranda shakes her head. “We oughtn’t to cause any unnecessary alarm. I don’t know nearly enough about this particular case yet.”

Min’s face clouds over. “So it’s a _case_ now, is it? Tell me, exactly, when you’ll know ‘enough’. Will it be before or after somebody’s pointing a gun at us?” She pushes her chair aside and stomps from the room without waiting for a reply.

\--

Miranda has been retired for five months. Before that, she was a detective for nearly half her life, and she knows more about the profession than she knows about any other.

Including, for instance, motherhood.

The carriage-house-turned-office hasn’t gotten much use of late, and after they almost died there, she didn’t expect to find it so… comforting. But as her computer clicks and hums to life, as she delves into whatever the Internet can yield about Famouse Fashion House, its larger-than-life owner Roxy Wasserman, and the apparently superhuman supermodel Tallulah Marx, it’s as if the past few months never happened.

Most of the newspapers and magazines rhapsodize about the brilliant designs and uncanny sex appeal of the women and men who display them. Words such as “hypnotic” and “mesmerizing” recur with noticeable regularity. The company is based in America, and is apparently a Wasserman family legacy. The latest in the family line has platinum hair, lush red lips, impossibly sexy eyes, and a tongue that drips acid from every sound bite. 

In one interview, Tallulah alludes to a “troubled past” from which “Roxy totally saved me. She taught me how to, like, channel my gifts and stuff.” _Gifts_. If there were other instances of her, or any of the other models, displaying extraordinary speed or dispatching an entire security team without breaking a sweat, they had been well hidden. She ends the interview by remarking that, “Telling us that we need to show our claws instead of acting like we’re at a tea party… that’s a vote of confidence, coming from Roxy. She’s hard on us, but it’s a tough business in a tough world. But she believes we can make it, so we believe it, too.”

The fall tour will be making a stop in London later this week.

\--

“This isn’t a formal investigation,” Miranda assures Roxy Wasserman. The two of them are seated by a fountain in the courtyard of the Hotel Aphrodite. The statue of the goddess herself smiles coyly above their heads like a sly chaperone. “I was hoping that I could speak with Tallulah.”

“Life is full of little disappointments,” Roxy drawls. In person, she’s every bit as glamorous as her photographs, coiffed and buffed and shined and painted within an inch of her life. “You’re not the first press vulture to want to talk to her. I have never been gladder to leave Paris in my life, and I’ve been making these trips for a… very long time.” She looks Miranda up and down. “Most of the others were better dressed than you, though. What’re the parking regulations?” She rolls her eyes at Miranda’s blank look. “For a time machine? From twelve years ago? When a suit like that was even moderately acceptable? If then.”

“I’m not the press,” Miranda tells her. “And I don’t mean her or your other charges any harm. I just want to know if what happened in Paris has ever happened before.”

Roxy’s perfect lips pout, and her perfect eyebrows draw together in a scowl. “And this is your business because…?”

“Call it professional curiosity. It’s certainly not the type of thing that the world sees every day, is it? A young girl cracking under the pressures of fame is a story that we’ve all heard before. A young girl displaying that kind of strength and speed out of nowhere…” Miranda pauses. “That’s something new.”

“Or something very old,” Roxy corrects her. “What are you getting at?”

“As of now, I’m not assuming a thing.” She tries not to. “But –“

The tinny music from Roxy’s purse – Cyndi Lauper’s “Money Changes Everything” – cuts her off. Roxy retrieves her mobile phone and flips it open. “Tell me something wonderful,” she sings out, and listens. “What? He wants us to go onstage after _whom_? No. Not another word, Trevor. No talk, just listen. You will go tell Mr. Branwell and his ‘events team’” – she hooks the fingers of her free hand, tipped with frighteningly long and sharp red nails, into quote marks – “that if he even thinks about that – if it becomes the barest gleam in his eye – then I will flay him alive. No, I mean _literally_. Without damaging my manicure. And we’ll make a new pair of high heels from his skin. Pass that message on to him, will you?” she coos suddenly. “That’s my darling boy.” She makes a little kissing noise into the phone, snaps it shut, and takes a few deep breaths.

Miranda remarks, “This is quite the interesting setup that you have here.”

Roxy opens her eyes. “Oh. You’re still here. Any more cryptic warnings up that quaint little sleeve of yours?”

“Just the one.” Miranda looks her in the eye. “I may not want to harm you and your people, but others might.” Unless Famouse is already in Klein and Utterson’s pocket, but her research into the organization’s history and reach during the Jackman case was thorough enough that she doesn’t think there’s any connection. “I can tell you what I know, if you’d like.”

“I’ve personally made sure that Tallulah won’t fly off the handle again,” Roxy replies, and bares teeth that seem to have grown just a little bit sharper. “I can take care of my own people. And I will. Do you understand?”

“I understand,” Miranda says truthfully.

\--

The nursery is simply furnished, with a cot, an overstuffed chair, a changing table, a cheerful red and blue rug, and a shelf full of picture books. Min replaces the one she’s been holding – a beautifully illustrated copy of _Little Red Riding Hood_ , which was a gift from their friend Katherine – when she hears Miranda enter the room. “What did you find out?” she asks coolly.

“A bit here, a bit there,” Miranda replies in kind. 

Min seems to thaw, almost imperceptibly. “You miss it, don’t you?”

“Three cheers for your deductive skills. I don’t suppose you do, as much.”

“What, the mountains of paperwork? The paranoid spouses? Surprise attacks from psychopaths, running for our lives… that part I know I don’t miss one bit. Can’t imagine why, though.”

They had assumed at first that Claire Jackman was just another of those paranoid spouses, selfish and possessive, looking for somebody to keep an eye on her straying husband. The truth about him, about both of them, had been something much stranger, more fascinating, and more deadly. 

The words still chase each other through Miranda’s head: _Uncanny sex appeal. Hypnotic. Mesmerizing. Something very old._ If monsters can step from the pages of nineteenth-century literature, what about tales that date back even further? Or is she just chasing windmills? And for what purpose?

“I know what I signed up for,” Min is saying. “I know that detective work isn’t as thrilling as the telly and the movies make it sound… except when it is.” Now her voice has hardened again, just as Roxy’s did when she talked about taking care of her own. “And I spent some time thinking about what the more dangerous cases might mean, for all three of us.” She rests her hands on her rounded belly. “Am I going to have to start thinking about it again?”

Miranda reaches out and feels the kicks and tremors beneath her hand. “We’ll keep this one safe. I know that much.”


End file.
